Holacracy = Clarity

What can companies expect when they adopt Holacracy? Clarity. Clarity across the board, and around lots of different business fundamentals.

First, you get clarity around the work, where the work lives, and how the work is performed — by what role, through what authority. With that level of clarity, you get much more effective resource alignment. You can make far better decisions about getting the right resources in the right role to do very concrete work. You can leverage talent that is often siloed and compartmentalized in some areas of the organization, and distribute it into other circles. You’ll get far more agility from your resources across the entire organization, and it’s safe to use them, because you’re continuously processing any tensions that result from those activities. So organizational clarity gives you better resource alignment.

You also get better restructuring. It’s really common for organizations to restructure themselves. That typically invites a lot of fear in a conventional organization — the classic “reorg”, where you’re worried about the power structures at play, and who reports to who, and the disruption of the organization’s work. In Holacracy, you actually experience very little of that. On the other hand, you can expect a lot of restructuring of the organization in order to better align with the work, which is exactly what you want. You want a structure that is fully engaged to deliver on the work of the organization, and one that can change on a dime to be better aligned with that work.

So you can expect clarity, restructuring in better alignment with the work, as well as visibility and transparency in tracking towards the outcomes you seek. This visibility comes from the discipline of focusing on next actions and projects in tactical meetings, along with recurring checklist items and metrics that track progress towards purpose. That level of visibility is rarely found in most conventional organizations. So you get all of that as an outcome of practice.